In the Radio Aurora Explorer team’s North Campus lab, high tech receivers, antennas, and solar panels are commonplace materials.

Each component, combined with the talents of Radio Aurora Explorer (RAX) team members, has the potential to become a part of a fully functioning spacecraft — but not without a crucial ingredient.

For Engineering senior Alex Sloboda, that crucial component is passion.

Sloboda was responsible for various aspects of the development of the RAX — the University’s first ever student-built satellite, which is set to launch Friday — and he said he has spent a lot of time in the North Campus lab since his freshmen year.

“University of Michigan students really put their blood, sweat and tears into the spacecraft,” he said. “Everything we’ve worked for over the past 2 years … has finally paid off.”

Team member Sara Spangelo, a student in Rackham, echoed Sloboda’s sentiments, adding that in a lab where cooperation and collaboration is the norm, the collective excitement that has been surrounding the project will reach a new high when the satellite launches from Kodiak, Alaska at about 8:20 p.m. on Friday.

Spangelo, Sloboda, and others will, after much anticipation, gather tomorrow on campus to see RAX’s mission commence — an endeavor nearly two years in the making.

Funded entirely by the National Science Foundation, the proposal for the mission was developed by James Cutler, an assistant professor of aerospace engineering and atmospheric, oceanic and space science, and Hasan Bahcivan, a research scientist at SRI International.

Spangelo said undergraduate and graduate students worked through multiple stages, which included design efforts, testing and interfacing to build the RAX.

“We know now how it should behave in orbit,” she said.

According to Sloboda, the team also manufactured many of the spacecraft’s materials, including parts members had originally planned to purchase.

“Our team was like, ‘You know what, if we want it done right, we have to do it ourselves,’” he said.

Once in orbit, the RAX will relay data to the team, which intends to examine the ways Earth-to-spacecraft communication is disrupted by space anomalies called magnetic field-aligned irregularities.

Radio signals will be transmitted from Alaska into plasma instabilities within the ionosphere — the highest region of the atmosphere. The RAX will then record and process these signals before they are sent back to Earth to be analyzed.

“We have antennas that we can use to ‘talk’ to the satellite,” explained team member John Springmann, a Rackham student. “We can send commands up to it, and ground stations around the world have volunteered to help us communicate with it.”

Though there’s a chance the RAX will fail — a possibility that Springmann said has created some apprehension among the group — members are confident that the satellite could remain in orbit for up to 25 years.

“It’s really just begun,” Spangelo said. “We’re trying to constantly bring in new people and get them involved. It’s an ongoing project.”

And though the satellite has yet to launch, the RAX team has already garnered attention on campus. During her Oct. 27 State of the University speech, University President Mary Sue Coleman praised the efforts of the RAX team, calling their work “teaching and learning in action.”

“The University of Michigan flourishes because our community believes in a promising future, one shaped by spectacular teachers, life-changing science and research, and talented graduates whose creativity is, literally, out of this world,” Coleman said during the speech.